Terra Incognita
by trufflemores
Summary: 3.02. The Earth itself reflects the time Barry has lost.


_I screwed everything up_.

Barry Flashes from point to point across the city, searching for missing time.

In the scientific world, lost time falls into one of three categories: angular unconformities, nonconformities, and disconformities.

 _Angular_ means cut off, renormalized; evidence is removed before new history piles on. Barry's memories are angular: they will not – or perhaps, _cannot_ – fill in the year-long gap between pre- and post-Flashpoint. The brave new world is a lost time. The world underneath it is tilted, forgone, forever changed by his actions. Without including the bridge of Flashpoint, the new timeline on top of it is continuous only to a point. Then Barry hits a wall and cannot make the misaligned timelines match. Something is missing. Something important.

Central City lives in the peaceful, predictable uppermost zone. It operates under the illusion that its history is unbroken from beginning to end, that what it sees at the surface represents the earth everywhere below it. Residents from various timelines have no conceptualization of a deeper history: they know only what they have seen. They don't know what Barry knows.

Breathless, he skids to a halt at the end of a residential street, leaning over to rest his hands on his knees. The neighborhoods are slightly different: landscaping, house colors, and residents vary. One domino tipped and an unpredictable chain of reactions began. Everywhere Barry looks, subtle differences abound. He has no memory of how they formed; he wasn't present for those moments. He only knows they formed when he was _away_ : that Julian's hatred is directed at another Barry, that Cisco's animosity is directed at another Barry, that Joe and Iris' relationship is directed at a very different conversation. He missed the middle. Now he must live with the result.

He knows the tilted earth, the land where he came from. The flat ground underneath him should feel stable, but its apparent homogeneity unnerves him. He knows what Central City is supposed to look like.

This is not _it_.

There are other problems, too. _Nonconformities_. Spaces where two conflicting realities attempt to converge: Wally's Speed, Dig's daughter, Cisco's brother.

Wally is a speedster – but he's also not a speedster. He's a dormant speedster. He's someone Flash deems suitably interesting to investigate. Barry doesn't want to pry, but Flash picks up on the traces of a Speed signature. A barely-there pulse. And it is hungry for more, for companionship in a world of exactly three living speedsters. Barry shares that hunger, waking in the middle of the night with the question _what-if_ chasing itself across his mind. It lasts until sunrise, when Flash's curiosity ebbs under Barry's exhaustion.

And he is exhausted, trembling legs scarcely wanting to support him. A burst of Speed takes him three blocks over before they cave out from under him. Hunched near a series of bushes, he shuffles back with painful deliberateness. Submerged in prickly shadow, he vanishes from all but keenest sight, taking a moment to rally his own strength.

It's not just Wally's Speed that post-Flashpoint has taken from him. His own stamina is down, as if he's lost his edge during those three months. He gets winded more easily. He needs to sit down after sustained runs because he can't get shaking legs to withstand his own weight, collapsing onto the nearest surface. He sleeps more and less: tired for longer spells, but bitterly familiar with Flash's insomnia.

Bringing his knees up to his chest, he breathes out cold air and wonders if he won't lose his powers here, too. He almost did in Flashpoint. He lost _memories_ , moments in time he can't check against anyone's opinion because _they don't know what they don't know_. Tears snake frozen trails down his face, terminating along the cut of his tense jawline; he can't change it and he has to live with it. There is no alternative.

Those memories are gone. _You can live without them_.

But can Dig live without _Sara_? It's hard for Barry to even fathom life without her: she's such a _light_ in Dig's life. Ollie would send him the occasional text showing Dig and his daughter, his easy, anticipated smile a comfort in dark times. It brought something warm and deeply satisfied to the forefront of Barry's consciousness. They were father and daughter. Meant to be. He couldn't imagine what an incalculable loss it would be to Dig if anything were to happen to Sara.

 _She wasn't even born here_ , he thinks, huddling a little closer as a breeze shakes the branches. _She doesn't exist_.

She does, he thinks vehemently, determined to _remember_ her even if everything else is slipping away. Even this timeline is attempting to autocorrect. It wants him to forget that which he should not know, that which he cannot change. _Adjust or die_.

He chooses neither.

Cisco feels the same way, propositioning a third choice: _Alter._

 _Save my brother. Save Dante_.

To deny Cisco hurts more than Zoom's world-ending slash across his spine did. The wave of crushing, suffocating, fiery pain was intense, but looking into Cisco's eyes and telling him, _I can't save your brother_ , is unbearable.

He can. _Change the timeline; rewrite history._ Unmake that which he made, recreate the past that was meant to be future.

Except, he thinks, closing his eyes and pressing his forehead against his knees, his dad – _not-Dad_ – was right. He can't predict how his changes will alter the timeline. He might fold the rocks in the way they were once folded, mimicking his past, but even so he'll never achieve continuity. He'll never find stability by warping the timeline. Worse, all he can do is push it to a limit it cannot withstand and break it. Bending the timeline is scary, bringing to mind nightmarish possibilities of permanent displacement, situations where he cannot restore a semblance of the familiar. Breaking it is exponentially worse: _irreparable_ damage that he'll never be able to fix, whole paradigms of reality twisted and shattered.

Surely Dante's death falls in the latter category.

 _You broke it._

Pushing himself to his feet, Barry shakes out his arms, wishing he could shake off the irrepressible sense of responsibility. It's deserved: he was the one who altered the timeline in the first place. If he'd left it alone, Dante would still be alive. Sara, not John, would be cradled in Dig's arms. Wally would—

 _Be a speedster?_

He doesn't know. According to Flash, Barry knows that he still has that capacity. _Dormancy can last for months_ , he recalls, thinking back to his own nine-month-long coma. There is no way to predict how soon or late Wally's Speed will emerge. But, should the right circumstances emerge, Barry is certain that it will.

Taking off, he cuts across the city, taking in the thousands of minor changes his actions wrought. Shops are closed down where he expected them to be. Unfamiliar faces attend counters, passing purchased goods across them with seasoned regularity. Tiny alterations throw him: thicker parking margins, slower streets, quieter times suggesting a speedster-less era. A metahuman-less era.

Barry knows _he_ didn't set off the particle accelerator explosion, but in many ways he knows that he is responsible for the disruption to so many lives. Metahumans with malicious intent would attack regardless of his intervention, but his inexperience led to losses. His compulsion to change time led to differences.

 _What did I take from you?_

A morbid thought overtakes him and he adjusts course, skidding to a halt in a vast cemetery seconds later. Flashing across the hundreds of graves would take only seconds and give him everything he needs to know. But he takes his time, kneeling in front of the first grave he finds and resting a hand on the headstone. Sparks slip quietly from fingertips to grave, polishing its surface. Speed can only do so much, he knows, but sometimes it is enough. When he stands, it takes a little effort, but the grave looks gently dusted, reverently cleaned.

It brings him no peace, but he repeats the ritual with each grave until his hands are too numb to feel. At some point he must rest his entire arm to draw out even a fraction of the warmth the first touch had, but the effect is still profound. There is an at-rest feeling in the air, like the final patch of dirt concealing a no-longer visible coffin.

Everywhere he looks, small, barely-there flowers spring at the base of the headstones he has touched. Speed has unpredictable effects, and a thrill of horror spikes through him at the thought of unintentional reanimation, but the flowers peak at tiny buds and his trepidation eases.

He closes his eyes when he comes across young graves, hunching to his knees. _Did I take you from your parents?_ he wonders. _Did you have parents to be taken from?_

He doesn't know, doesn't dare inquire, isn't sure he could rise from the earth if he knew with certainty that it was his fault that fourteen-year-old would never finish high school, that that kindergartner would never grow up. He stays low until sunrise, shuffling forward on his knees from grave-to-grave, the morning mist coalescing on his suit, treating him like the very grass. Earthen, belonging.

 _I don't belong here_ , he thinks.

 _Flash_.

The speedster skids to a halt at his side. He puts an arm under Barry's flagging shoulders and draws him to his feet. Barry doesn't fight him, doesn't even have the strength to say, _It's you_. All he can do is fall into step beside Wally, moving slowly for a change, no-rush, no-need-to. Wally doesn't even have a suit yet ( _he will_ ), but he deserves the mantle more than Barry ever could.

 _You broke it. You broke it. You broke it._

Felicity told him to fix it like it was that easy, fix it like that was _possible_. It isn't.

Maybe it never will be.

But as sun rises and they limp home, Flash leaning on a seemingly ordinary man's shoulder, the otherworldly grounded, Barry recalls through each tearing breath that there is a third type of time-loss.

 _Disconformity_.

It's the way Barry hasn't seen sun rise for sixteen years here but still knows the feeling like his own heartbeat, the way he can't recall every hug Iris and he have ever exchanged but feels their warmth in her presence, the fact that he hasn't personally sculpted it but the earth has a pulse he can feel, like everything has a Speed signature, and it matches his expectation. The surficial differences ache – having a partner he doesn't remember (or like), searching with painful optimism for Eddie's name in the CCPD registry, looking around for the familiar and finding dissimilarity instead – but the world is still whole.

Memories aren't permanent, and neither are those people who form them. Their loss is not solely the result of time travel. Knowing that they'll disappear gradually, try though he might to prevent it, alarms Barry, but he knows that part of that is _living_. Experiencing an incomplete picture is the necessary cost of moving forward in time.

Inside Joe's house, they find Iris at the coffeepot, reading a book Barry doesn't remember being on their shelves. She looks up when they step inside, Wally shutting the door behind himself. Setting the book down mid-page, she walks over to them, and Barry knows he's cold, colder than even an ordinary human, but he can't resist the way she wraps her arms around him in a hug. Wally lets him go and he keeps his feet underneath him, gently, gently holding onto her without pressing his palms against her back, arms locked lightly around her.

 _Don't leave_ , she tells him without speaking.

 _I won't_ , he replies with a kiss to the top of her head. _Not this time_.

He can't get back what was lost, but he can tend the earth anew, here, treat it greatly, treat it well, and help new life grow.

It won't ever be the home he remembers, but nothing is permanent.

Holding onto Iris, aware of Wally's Speedster heat in the space nearby, he thinks, _Some things are_ , and knows he can live with them.


End file.
